Good afternoon,

I have been talking with some other engineers here that are trying to get up to speed with Solidworks, and I am currently working on or figuring out a best practice for my prototype assembly that is fairly large for a gearbox, but there are some components that are or will go through redesign, anyway, we are wondering if using configuration is the best way to do this for serial number 2.

I will be making the new parts with new part numbers. Currently this is the way I have found, but not sure if it is the best way.

What is your option or suggestion for us without going through everything and redoing, this also includes the layout drawing showing the correct parts between serial number 1 and serial number 2 with new redesigned parts.

Thanks,

Terry

I will try to clear up what we did here so far to what we are calling serial number 1.

We have serial number 1 almost done and put together, however, as assembly has been putting the gearbox together, they are discovering some errors in both design or machining of the part. We in engineering department has made modifications to reduce what would/should have been scrap. This gearbox ships in a few days and if we remake these parts, we will not get some of the gears back from heat treat for 3 to 4 weeks. We are already behind schedule with this one.

I was the original designer and when a shaft went from being a single piece item that required sending to heat treat, I was told after releasing the parts to production, to try to make the shaft into multiple parts with the use of splines for the gears to be on, this way only the gears needs to be heat treated, I did this, which became revisions on the original drawings. However, one thing I forgot to do in my calculations was to remove the heat treating expansion that happens and we try to compensate for.  This left dimensions over pins incorrect and the gear to shaft is very loose. So we are scrapping the shaft, and making adjustment to the current shaft part to make it match, fit, work with the current gear that is back from heat treat.

I was told to make new drawings with the corrected spline data for the gears and shaft for serial number 2. Also with this change we have a system called Made2Manage which we use to track and schedule thew BOM. One feature of this program is that it has serial number in and out columns that now has to be used to get these new parts for serial number 2.

So let us say that with serial number 1, the original shaft was S-12345 rev.3 and in the layout BOM it is called out as item 10, in serial number 2, it would be S-23451 rev. 0 but in the layout BOM, it is called out as item 10A.

I hope that this helps you understand more.

I have tried using the configurations for the 2 different serial numbers and have it working in the model, but as for changing the layout prints for serial number 2, that is where I am currently struggling. All my prints for serial number 1 are in Workgroup PDM in its own project folder.

We do not use pack and go for revision control here.